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Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz

Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz live in Berlin. Their last film, No Past/ No Future, was presented in the Swiss Pavilion (Teatro Fondamente Nove) of the Venice Biennale in Nov. 2011. No Past was also shown at Art Basel Statements in 2011 (Ellen de Bruijne Projects). Recent projects include a solo show at Centre d'Art de Genève, Contagieux! Rapports contre la normalité (2010) and the collective exhibitions All I Can See is the Management, Gasworks, London and Re.Act.Feminism #2: a performing archive, Centro Cultural Monterhermoso, Vitoria-Gasteiz (Spanish Basque country, 2011). The magazine Art 21 published a monographic essay on their work (winter 2010-2011). A catalogue entitled Temporal Drag has just been released by Hatje-Cantz. Artists' website: www.boudry-lorenz.de

"Our works often revisit materials from the past, usually photographs or films, referring to and excavating unrepresented or unlegible moments of queerness in history. These works show embodiments which are not only able to connect different times, but also to draw relations between different times, thus revealing possibilities for a queer futurity.In Normal Work, N.O.Body and Contagious, our focus is the history of sex and gender discourses and practices, as well as the meaning of "visibility" since early modernity. The works thematize the ways that the staging of visibility takes over functions like self-empowerment, glamour, and recognition, while also devaluing, pathologizing, and criminalizing. They reflect the nearly simultaneous invention of sexuality, sexual perversions, and photography as well as their relation to the colonial economy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using film to appropriate historical images allows for a shift in the authority, means, and conditions of the production of knowledge as in N.O. Body, where a freak takes up the role of the professor and produces laughter in place of knowledge expressed in language.Most of our works were shot on 16mm film material. This demands a concentrated execution and supports the perception that the images show a "performance". It is not a question of ‘acting,’ in which, for instance, the (drag) performer Werner Hirsch–a performer that we have often collaborated with–purports to play a role in a conventionally convincing manner. Rather, it is about a series of actions and practices, carefully carried out, which are recorded and repeated in the projection in the exhibition space. The topic is the performativity of the performance, the actions, the operations, and their effects.At the same time, we incorporate lines of desire, the conventions of fetishization, and the glamour of film portraits (with its associated valuation) for the images of the performance. The film Normal Work fetishizes the strong muscles, the clothes, the masculinity, and the dirty hands of a domestic servant. The films No Future and No Past fetishize the looks and practices of Punk, a temporality of rejection and an unappropriate/d gender presentation. We are interested in the question of how "normality" can be reworked today, how difference can be lived without constant disempowerment, without being appropriated and without taking on the neo-liberal economy’s offers of integration." (Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz)